"Reality and Other Stories" by John Lanchester

Reality and Other Stories

by John Lanchester

A book review 

John Lanchester is a journalist and author of five novels, of which The Debt to Pleasure won the 1996 Whitbread Book Award in the First Novel category and his most recent – The Wall – was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize.

Lanchester’s short story Signal opens Lanchester’s forthcoming collection on Faber & Faber, Reality and Other Stories.  The story was originally published in The New Yorker in March 2017.  In an interview he gave for the same issue, Lanchester described it as his first piece of short fiction, as well as the first ghost story he had ever attempted.  Much as I enjoy the works of authors dedicated to the supernatural, I am always intrigued when a writer not typically associated with the genre has a go at it.   In this case, Lanchester comes up with a tale where the ghostly element is not immediately apparent.  A couple and their two children are invited to spend New Year’s Eve at a luxurious mansion in the English countryside.  Their enjoyment of the festivities is marred by the presence of a tall man, always intent on his mobile phone, who also appears to take an unnatural interest in the children.  When the truth about him is revealed, it is at once more benign and more chilling than what we are led to believe at the start.

The collection includes three other stories which transpose conventional tropes of supernatural fiction into contemporary contexts. In Coffin Liquor, the narrator is an academic invited to an Eastern European country to address a conference dealing with the unlikely intersection between economics and folklore.   An incorrigible sceptic, he soon tires of the subject, and decides to skip the talks and do some solo sightseeing.  His walk around the town leads him to a graveyard housing the remains of a much-hated feudal overlord, whose particularly cruel practices are the stuff of local legend. An old woman warns the narrator not to take these tales lightly – advice which he stupidly ignores.  Any reader of the stories of M.R. James will know what comes next… but the inevitable haunting has a particularly unusual aspect to it.   Similar playful riffs on the horror tradition can be found in Charity, about – of all things – a cursed selfie-stick and Cold Call, about a spooky contact from beyond the grave.

The remaining stories in the collection are not exactly works of supernatural fiction.  Although difficult to classify, they are closer to “weird tales” in the mould of, say, J.B. Priestley.   We Happy Few, a piece first published in Esquire, and The Kit, both have a playfully mordant twist at the end.  In the title piece, Reality, the participants in a reality show wait in vain for the games to start.  Initially, there are only subtle indications that something is not quite right, but by the end of the story, Lanchester manages to evoke a sense of claustrophobia and dread.   Which of These Would You Like is, in my view, the most disturbing work of the lot, even more than the overtly “horror” stories.  In its depiction of a prisoner placed on death-row for reasons of which he is not aware, it reflects the same themes as Reality, but is much darker in the despair it conveys.

Lanchester might claim to be a “novice” where short fiction is concerned, but this collection is a strong one which delivers thrills, twists and food for thought. 

Hardcover, 208 pages

Expected publication: October 1st 2020 by Faber & Faber